Does the World Need Another Diet Book?

Pick becomes the Optimal Word

Daniel Lieberman is a Harvard professor and founding chair of its Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He has a boatload of impressive credentials and a new book. Recently he was a guest on Terry Gross’s NPR show, Fresh Air. They spoke about this new work: Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, And Eating Well.

As I weighed listening to the podcast, three questions came to mind:

• Does the world need another diet book?
• Am I fed up with diet gurus no matter how great their credentials?
• And is it possible that my dad – with no credentials – had the best diet plan ever?

I promise to give my opinion on these questions, but first, let me mention two highlights from the NPR interview.

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There are so many diets to try!

Daniel Lieberman and his wife, Tonia, tried out many popular diets. They stayed on each for two weeks to see how their bodies, minds, and appetites responded. Here are some of the diets they tried:

• Raw Food Diet (this was by far the worst)
• Paleo Diet
• Mediterranean Diet
• Atkins/Low-Carb Diet
• Low-Fat/High-Carb Diet
• Intermittent Fasting
• DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet
• Blue Zone Diets (I have written about this diet in a story called Meeting Up with the Three Sisters.)
• Meal Replacement/Liquid Diet

Lieberman says all these diets have a grain of truth to them – and a lot of good science behind them – making the best diet any diet you can stick to.

He mentions a report from the National Weight Loss Registry. It shows that most people are not following a particular diet, they are cooking at home and thus eating less processed foods. They are exercising. And they are weighing themselves on a regular basis.

Lieberman says there are two ways evolution is working against us in dieting:

• Since body fat is important for our biology, our bodies have evolved to hold on to our weight. We actually store an unusual amount of fat as compared to other mammals.
• Continuing with this fact, when we end a diet, the body wants to bring itself back to its previous weight. Worse than this, it is not understood why, but the body wants to go back to its maximum previous weight.

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Knowing all this, does the world need another diet book, particularly this one?

I am always quick to read articles – or listen to podcasts – about diets, nutrition, and even diet drugs. When I do so, I am looking for just one interesting tidbit to walk away with. My earliest memory of doing this is a long-ago nutrition book by Jane Brody (nutrition columnist for the New York Times from 1976-2022) in which she called almonds a nutritional powerhouse for weight control and longevity. Guess who’s been eating almonds ever since?

So yes, listening to the podcast was time well spent. What I liked best was that he is not proposing a new diet but is instead telling all the pros and cons of those that exist. Since he has found no perfect diet, he advocates taking the best of the diets that already exist and living life from there.

The Terry Gross interview was 45 minutes long and the book is 416 pages long. Thus, I’m sure one can find many interesting tidbits to walk away with from either or from both of these sources.

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But what about this particular guru?

Daniel Lieberman’s credentials are impressive. He is a paleoanthropologist who received degrees from Harvard University and Cambridge University. He taught at both Rutgers University and George Washington University before joining Harvard as a Professor in 2001.

Beyond this, Lieberman has written three previous books:

• Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding (2020, Pantheon)
• The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease (2013, Pantheon)
• The Evolution of the Human Head (2011, Harvard University Press)

But what I like best about Lieberman is that the only thing he is selling is his books. There is one former guru whose podcasts I listened to for months but when the long list of nutritional products he was hawking grew to include bovine colostrum, I quit listening!

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And then there’s my all-time favorite guru, my dear old dad:

His philosophy for diet – and for life – was simple: Everything in moderation.

Lieberman agrees with Dad when he says this to Terry Gross: Why pick a low-fat diet or a low-calorie diet or a low-carb diet when instead you can pick the best parts of all three of these diets, one without too much fat or too many calories or too many carbs. Indeed, all these elements are ok – in moderation.

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PICK becomes the optimal word. With no optimal diet to recommend and with over 40,000 foods in a grocery store to consider (much of it ultra processed), choosing wisely is all important. Daniel Lieberman’s book exists to help us PICK.

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If you like my writing, I hope you will check out my new book, Chai on Life. It contains 36 slice-of-life stories ranging in topics from belly fat to Billy Joel. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon. There is even a companion journal for you to write the stories of your life.

Chai on Life is available in 3 formats: Hard Back, Kindle, and AudioBook.

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